The Grimoire Ritual
The Creation of the Grimoire While many now believe that the Grimoire is only a figurative title for the magical power assembled during the course of the ritual, when the first Grimoire Ritual was conducted, an actual Grimoir had been constructed as the ultimate magical artifact to serve as a vessel for the ritual itself. In the beginning, around the year 700TD there were nine great houses of mages who fought for supremacy on Karsunt. In time they were pressured by other powerful groups, to confine their extensive battles as to not upset the balance of the world any further, at which point Uudun Rubicon, leader of house Rubicon proposed a game with high stakes to quell the hostilities, and periodically allocate dominion over the mages to one house. This was the first step towards the ritual. When the magic was first drawn up, a mythal was discovered that could be implemented to generate one superior wish spell, if fed with enough mana, so the nine heads of the nine houses agreed to construct a device to facilitate that mythal, and even out certain advantages between the houses by implementing the system that allows for a powerful heroic spirit to be summoned into the mages' service. The cover of the Grimoire was crafted from the bones of the past generation of mages, and from the skins of nine selected sacrifices, chosen from among the houses mages themselves, eleven pages each were crafted to fill the Grimoire. The rules of the ritual, as well as the magic runes that made them reality were inscribed on these pages, and each page bore the crest of the house which had crafted it, allowing powerful mages to summon part of their superior magic in the form cards which could delimit a servant's abilities further, to bring him or her closer to their former strength. The History of the Ritual Only upon completing the steps nescessary to initate the first Grimoire Ritual, did the mages realize that Uudun had concealed his true power, for he was an ancient red dragon, known in past epochs as a cruel tyrant, and a monster, who had dove into obscurity to found his own house of mages, red dragons all. Instead of suppressing wars to appease the powers of the world, the greates mage war of all ages broke loose, known to this day as the Grim War, a power struggle with no parallel that decimated the mages, and completely destroyed two of the old houses, house Tara, and house Aerbirth. In the end, Uudun had defeated the mages and stolen their mana, using the very device he had made them craft, and his wish was granted: As he uttered the words and completed the ritual, his dragon scales hardened, and became forever impervious to Tim-hurr’tès scythe. The scond Grimoire Ritual was initiated around 1500TD by Drakwyn Ribezal, who had discovered the remenants of house Tara, and in their records had discovered the method to re-awaken the ritual, and start a second one. To replace house Aerbirth, he searched out their old castle, and bound their crest to his apprentice, who he killed right after the initiation of the ritual had been completed. In the end he was defeated by a powerful vamipre lord, Johannes Lohbert Bach, who had appropreated the crest of the mage house Dyley after destroying them. But Johannes himself was not only stricken down by the leader of house Morningsun, the gold dragon Ohvas, but utterly consumed by his wrath, for Ohvas used his wish to bring ruin to all undead. To his horror though, the Grimoir somehow twisted his wish and shunned Tim-hurr’tè from Karsunt, making its inhabitants deathless and free to destroy any undead on Karsunt without fear of death. So terrible however were the repricutions of this wish that Ohvas was punished by his house by being cursed to never again soar through the skies of Karsunt again, forever trapped in a humanoid form. The century during which death was shunned from Karsunt, and all major groups of undead were nearly hunted to extinction was later referred to as the Long Silver Night.